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Quick Identification of Common Mystery Snails

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Below include some of the most common Mystery Snails available in the trade.
Most are just labeled "Mystery Snail or Golden, Black, etc... Mystery Snail"
The Following diagrams are hand created on Microsoft's wonderful Paint program, so details are NOT perfect. To ensure closer accuracy, I Google'd the shell of each and compared at the end my drawings to them and decided to borrow the idea of angle diagrams from Applesnail.net.

Disclaimer
So, since these do look like cheap facsimiles of the (C) S. Ghesquiere Images posted on Applesnail.net, I will hearby give the before mentioned person comparison fact checking credit in the versions I hand drawn. In addition I also hearby grant open rights to anyone wishing to use these images I have drawn as public domain property.

The two most common to find: Pomacea Diffusa and Pomacea Canaliculata.
In conclusion, when choosing a Mystery Snail from a Petshop, you must look carefully and determine if the snail before you is a Diffusa, or anything else. If you have no plants or plans for planting the aquarium, your choices are not so limited. But if you enjoy the lush green of your aquarium and hate Algae, then Pomacea Diffusa is the snail of choice for you.

very nice! I shall have to grab one of my snails and align it like your drawings to find out for sure.

Can you comment on the usage of the common names "apple snail" and "mystery snail"? I have seen them used somewhat interchangeably, but I'm not sure if one is a subset of the other, or what.

Apple Snail name refers to the family Ampullariidae. The name Mystery Snail is a Petshop and Chain store reference to that they don't know what kind of snail it for sure is. Hence, your getting a snail of mysterious origins.

A true Apple Snail will have a Lung/Gill combo, a siphon tube, Larger whorls with each swirl, Long tentacles near the mouth, and they will lay eggs above the water line. This was a quick summary of what's listed on the page applesnail.net

yay! my fish store didnt lie. My apple snails breathe in and out of water, so i assume lung/gill combo, as well as my tiger and zebra snail. Whats siphon tube look like? Is that their long, snout-like mouth that comes out from head unlike tiger or zebra that has smashed? And they have wierd, octopus like tentacles that are creepy looking. Are apple snails male/female, or asexual?

They have those tentacles/feelers, the tube is that straw looking thing actually coming out from their side area towards the surface. They are also Male or Female, so no worries on over populations is you have just one.

No, those pictures came from my MS Paint Application on my business license Vista PC. I produced those as raw sketches over course of days and comparing with Google'd images and fact checking with the (C) S. Ghesquiere Images posted on Applesnail.net. As such I carefully outlined all this in the first two introductory paragraphs of my article.
In conclusion, I gave open copyright to anyone wishing to use these, without my permission, therefore eliminating any profiting rights I might have had over the images. Without profiting rights, and simultaneously granting fact checking credit to (C) S. Ghesquiere for comparing the accuracy of my works, I've eliminated any legal infringement possibilities.

In addition to this, this public domain work is available for anyone to read or quote openingly, as it's publishing date makes it public domain knowledge, as it is older than 70 years, being from the mid 19th century.MONOGRAPH
O F T H E G E N U S
A M P U L L A R I ALovell Augustus Reeve, London, ca 1843(C)

The origional diagrams found at Applesnail.net licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License under Stijn Ghesquiere, were used as I previously mentioned; to verify the correctness of the shells I drew using the MS Paint program. While performing research on S. Ghesquiere, I came across the page bellow, outlining how Mr. Stijn Ghesquiere would like credit to be given him for any credit to be given. As such, I fulfill that wish with this post to the founder of Applesnail.net.http://www.applesnail.net/content/author.htm

If anyone would like to read about Stijn Ghesquire, you can find some information on Wiki and the Author section of Applesnail.net.

He is a big fan of GNU-linux and open source in general. He strongly opposes software patents, and believes that copyright should be limited to no longer then the life of the author. After all, we all benefit from the work and creativity other people. No-one can say he/she did invent everything without using work and information derived from other people. So once money has been earned, Stijn believes, it's time to give other chances to fully benefit from your work too.

I find this quote very provocative and at it's core a simple truth. No one learned everything on their own. We all have credit to give to all who taught us everything from birth... From how to feed ourselves, to those who teach us the trades we actually profit from. All knowledge belongs to all.